Works with · Facilities, labs & sensors
A freezer alarm that actually wakes someone up
Send temperature, humidity and freezer alarms from Sensaphone, Monnit, Temp Stick, SensorPush and similar sensors to Email2Phone as a phone call.
Last updated September 2026
A walk-in freezer drifting out of range at 1 a.m. costs a night's inventory if nobody sees the email until morning. Threshold alarms are the clearest case for a phone call there is: rare, unambiguous, and expensive to miss.
yourname@email2phone.net address, narrow it with a filter, and the alerts you
choose arrive as a phone call that reads the message aloud. Nothing to install on either side.
Setting it up
- Find the alarm contact settings in your sensor portal. Most cloud sensor platforms have a contacts or notification list per device or per group. Sensaphone Sentinel, Monnit iMonnit, Temp Stick and SensorPush all support an email recipient per alarm rule.
- Add your Email2Phone address as an email recipient. Add it alongside your existing recipients rather than replacing them — you keep the email trail and gain the call.
- Set the threshold and the delay. Give the threshold a delay long enough to survive a defrost cycle or a door being held open — typically 15 to 30 minutes above the limit — so you are called for real excursions, not routine ones.
- Name the sensor so the call makes sense. The call reads the alert aloud, so a sensor named "Freezer 2 — main kitchen" produces a far more useful phone call than "Sensor 4".
- Add a second phone number. Facilities alarms are the strongest case for simultaneous dialing: ring the manager and the backup at the same time so whoever is awake answers.
- Trigger a real test. Take the probe out of the freezer and let it warm past the threshold, or use the portal's test-alarm function if it has one. Test the whole chain, not just the email.
Which alerts should ring the phone
Filter on the word ALARM, ALERT or the sensor location name. If several sites report into one portal, filter on the site name and route each site to its own manager.
Filters are the whole game here. A phone call is worth using precisely because it is rare — if everything calls you, nothing does. Most people end up with one or two filters and leave the rest of their notifications as email.
A filter is one condition and one action:
- If From, To, CC, Subject or Body — equals, contains, begins, ends or matches — your text.
- Then either ignore the message, or tick the phones to call. One filter can ring several people.
Anything no filter excludes goes to your default number, so you can start with "everything calls me" and tighten from there.
The wider guide to how Email2Phone works — get called when a sensor emails an alarm — covers filters, quiet hours and what happens when nobody picks up.
The same pattern covers alarm panels, generator controllers, UPS management software and building management systems — anything that can send an email on an event.
Sensor platforms that offer their own voice-call add-on usually charge per site. If you monitor several sites, one Email2Phone plan covering all of them is normally cheaper.
A multi-site lab routes every probe through one address and one filter per site: how the excursion alerts are set up.
Competitor pricing and features last checked 8 September 2026.
What happens when the call comes
Your phone rings and says a message is waiting. Press 1 to hear it, then 8 to save it, 7 to delete it or 5 to record a spoken reply; on a phone with voicemail switched off, nothing counts as delivered until someone does, and Email2Phone calls back, five times over three hours, if nobody does. A burst of alerts is one call, not one per email. Ringing several phones, quiet hours and dial-in replay are each covered in Help.
What it costs, wherever you are
Email2Phone calls any phone in any country. Plans start at $10/month for 40 call credits, and a minute costs 1 credit to the US and Canada and 1–6 credits elsewhere — most alert calls are well under a minute either way. An admin routing only genuine outages to a call typically stays inside the Basic plan. Check the rate for your own number with the calculator.
Temperature & freezer sensors questions
What if the internet at the site is down?
A cloud sensor cannot send email if it cannot reach the internet, so no notification system that depends on the sensor's own connection will help. Sites that need that guarantee use a sensor with a cellular backup radio.
Can two managers be called at once?
Yes. Add both numbers and choose simultaneous dialing so they ring together, or sequential dialing to try the second only if the first does not answer.
Other tools that work the same way
Email2Phone works with anything that can send an email, so the pattern above applies far beyond this one tool.